


Tagelied

by halotolerant



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Early Mornings, Hotel Sex, M/M, Morning After, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 02:02:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11727186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: There’s a glow of sunlight around the edges of the curtains. Dawn, already, and the night mostly over. It is summer, after all.





	Tagelied

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings** : Some references to the scenes at the beaches i.e. war is hell
> 
>  **Author Notes** :The Tagelied (dawn song) is a particular form of mediaeval German-language lyric. It depicts the separation of two lovers at the break of day.

Leaving begins with standing up.

 

And Alex has made himself stand up, at last, and his legs have just about carried him to the window, across tatty carpet and bare boards that creaked under his weight.

 

There’s a glow of sunlight around the edges of the curtains. Dawn, already, and the night mostly over. It is summer, after all.

 

June, now, somehow, somehow the months ticked over. June the 6th or 7th – Alex is losing count. This time last year he would have been at Weymouth. Nearly at Weymouth – they set off Saturday the 9th. This time last year he was on his way to fish suppers and the landlady of the little seafront place dusting her aspidistras, and Alex’s mother telling him off about tracking sand inside the hall. This time last year Dorset was a half-imagined holiday place for a Surbiton boy, and he’d spent most of the time in his own head anyway, reading the illustrated papers and H.G. Wells.

 

Alex stretches out his hand, pushes the curtain aside a little. The thick, once-red fabric is dusty, and there are dead flies on the sill, given an imitation of life by the displacement of the air.

 

How many dead men has he seen in the last week? How many shades of white skin, pallid and rippled with water damage? How close did he get to not being here at all?

 

He turns his head – can’t help it – to look back at the bed. Just to check. Just to… he drifted half asleep on that beach more than once. And he’d think he was somewhere else, but really he was there, always there, perhaps there for the rest of his life.

 

But this room is solid, crude and real, and Alex tears his gaze away again.

 

Leaving depends on not looking any more. On finding something else to focus on.

 

The sliver of view Alex has gained through a smeared window is nothing but the wall of the building behind, a chasm down to a back area that looks mostly mud, and perhaps a chicken coop. Makes sense. Hotel like this, doesn’t do to have it be situated where someone could see in. This isn’t like Weymouth; this isn’t a place the landlady minds about her stair carpet. No one here signs a visitors’ book.

 

The room isn’t much cleaner than the curtains. Not that that isn’t partly their fault, his and Tommy’s, now.

 

Alex turns back one again, can’t resist, and lets his eyes rake over the bed. Shivers.

 

The Weymouth hotel had a piano in the parlour, and Alex’s sister had played from damp-spotted Victorian music books, picking things out and getting applauded the way charming little girls do. And so Alex has reason to know that there are too many songs about the morning. Songs about morning like there are poems about the sea. Like neither of them could rip you to pieces.

 

On the bed, Tommy is lying on his front, arse up, one foot falling sideways out of the bed. He’s naked, and the covers have slipped a little. A few red spots on the curve of his shoulder, and one on the summit of his buttock, and all that black hair across his skin, scattered like grass on sand dunes.

 

Alex wants him enough to feel hollow with it.

 

They’d kept meaning to part, last night. Trying to part. Or – Alex hadn’t meant it, quite. Can’t be sure what Tommy had felt, had intended when he’d murmured about leaving the railway depot and then the restaurant and then after, wandering the streets, wandering and wandering without anywhere to go, until Alex hadn’t been able to see how the night could end except sleeping on a bench at the station. They’d both got families to go back to. And a week’s leave for every soldier returning from France wasn’t so long, whichever way you sliced it.

 

But, “I know a place,” Tommy had said, maybe just after midnight. He’d sounded quite calm. “A hotel. Out near Seven Dials.”

 

Right up until they’d been in the room, Alex didn’t know if he was reading too much into it. It was late, no doubt they deserved a bed after nine days on the sand and one on a train, and Alex didn’t know how things worked in London, did he? Maybe blokes asking blokes to hotel rooms made sense, with London prices. Tommy had said he grew up in the East End, five kids to a room.

 

But Tommy had looked… Alex had thought that Tommy had looked… Even before, even the first time he’d ever met Tommy’s eyes Alex had thought…

 

Alex had thought last night: _If Gibson was here instead of me, he’d know what Tommy wants._

 

In the room, though, Tommy had walked towards Alex slow and steady, firm purpose in his eyes, and kept walking, until the backs of Alex’s knees hit the bed and he was sitting, craning his mouth up, and Tommy still kissing him, all salt and beer.

 

Tommy’s lips were rough, dry from the wind. It was more like kissing a girl than Alex would have expected. Only better. But that hadn’t been the kissing, as such. That had been the heat between his legs, how he’d broken into a sweat every time Tommy’s hands moved on him, even just between his shoulders and his neck, even through his khakis.

 

Tommy had known what he was doing, Alex hadn’t. He thought sometimes before about girls and the stuff on the films, taking her in your arms and all of that – there seemed to have to be a lot of talking.

 

Now, watching the edge of shadow and new sunlight rake at Tommy’s breathing body, Alex feels it in his gut. Knowledge, rhythm, pitch and tempo. Touching another person is both impossibly awkward and entirely instinctive, and he knows now. For the first day of his life he’s woken up wise.

 

He could put his lips to the dip of Tommy’s spine now, right between the wings of his shoulder blades. He could touch the indentations between Tommy’s ribs; trace the outlines of the purpling bruises that sprawl like coastline maps.

 

It aches, how hard Alex is getting. His heart is thumping in his chest, blood hot.

 

When Tommy wakes up, he might want to go again. He’d liked it enough last night, or so it seemed. Been patient, really, and almost gentle. They said men hurt you, if you every let them, that they’d do terrible, unspeakable things. Or so had said Alex’s friends, when they were all young and drinking stolen sloe gin and laughing themselves red. Alex has wondered, since, but never found any other source of information.

 

Nothing Tommy did hurt. Nothing like hurting at all, except it cracked you, creased you, made you open your mouth and pant.

 

The stain is visible, on the sheet, from Alex, from Alex when Tommy’s hands had been almost – _almost_ \- gentle, and Alex had finished fast and sharp and short. All over the sheets, and on Tommy’s hand, and Tommy had grinned at him, reached down and cradled his bollocks and murmured something, low.

 

And then, as Alex lay there, sweating, sprawling, embarrassed at the start, they’d watched together as Tommy’s hand worked between Alex’s spread legs. Up and down, up and down in waves. Tommy had been breathing almost as hard as Alex, and in the same rhythm. His breath on Alex’s neck, hot, moist. Alex would have let him put his hand anywhere.

 

Tommy might want that again. Or something else, one of the things that Alex has only vaguely imagined and barely understands.

 

Or Tommy might want to leave.

 

Alex ought to leave.

 

They both ought to. They’ve both got families who’ll be worried, wondering.

 

This time last year, Alex’s mother knew most of the things he’d ever done. And she’d been that proud when he’d enlisted. He wonders what part of the last two weeks she’d wish away the hardest on his behalf.

 

This morning in the eggy dawn light, Alex’s body is covered in cuts and scrapes and bruises and remnants of motor oil and Tommy’s dried spend. He can’t picture himself walking up the path to his mother’s door, past the beds of roses as his late father had laid them out.

 

Although the sun is up, it’s cold. And despite the heat in him, and because of it, Alex wants to climb back into the bed. He wants to press this body against Tommy’s, see if they make more sense together.

 

The hair at the nape of Tommy’s neck smells sharp and bitter. His skin tastes of salt. His feet are a mess – Alex’s the same – too long marching in one pair of boots and the same wet socks.

 

Them and thousands like them. Would Tommy be here like this with whomever he’d been left with?

 

But it feels like if they slid together, if Alex reached out again, like they’d fit like key and lock.

 

Alex brings the fingers of his own hands together, palm to palm, interlaces them. Holds his breath.

 

He’s still standing there, watching. Watching the light creeping over Tommy’s body, the minutes ebbing, drifting away as the sun comes up.

 

Alex could leave now. Slip away. He could make another escape. Go out and try to find himself, find whoever he was before this and try and make that suit fit.

 

Moving carefully back to the window, he peeks up at the sky. Maybe he can tell if it’s going to rain. Maybe he’ll see Messerschmitts flying in rigid, dark formation, and so an end of questions.

 

“Mornin’,” Alex hears, long minutes later.

 

Tommy’s up on his elbows, smiling at him, blinking a little, lashes low.

 

“Not morning yet,” Alex tells him, after a moment. “Not yet.”

 

Tommy’s squinting into the light. He lets out a huff of breath that isn’t quite a laugh. Leans back down again.

 

Alex doesn’t decide to go over; by the time he’s there it’s already happening, he’s already warm.

 

“Not yet,” Alex says again.

 

“Soon,” Tommy tells him, and after a moment traces the curve of Alex’s cheekbone with the pad of his thumb, long and slow and easy. His hand shakes a little.

 

Tommy kisses him, and during it they get side by side again, and Alex is flat on his back and every part of him reaching up.

 

When Tommy breaks away, gazing down, Alex is glad of the light, if it means he can see Tommy look at him like that.

 

“But not yet,” Tommy agrees.

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
